Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method of managing print jobs, and in particular, it relates to a method of automatically editing the document and the job ticket of the print job to achieve certain printing effects.
Description of Related Art
In a print shop system, a print job refers to the combination of a document to be printed and a job ticket which contains parameters defining the print and/or finish settings for the print job. The job ticket is a separate file from the document to be printed and is associated with the document and managed by the print shop management system. In practice, there are often situations when tab sheets, slip sheets, etc. (collectively referred to as “separating sheets” in this disclosure) need to be inserted into the printed materials, when the original print job does not contain such sheets. To achieve this with a conventional print job management system, a print shop operator needs to manually edit print settings in the job ticket and/or the document of the print job in order to insert each of the separating sheets. For example, if a customer submits a PDF document that contains multiple articles, and requests that a tab sheet be inserted between adjacent articles, the print shop operator will need to edit the PDF document to add the tab sheets, and edit the job ticket to specify the attributes of the tab sheet. Such an operation is time-consuming. The operator must pay attention in order to prevent improper input when editing print settings in a job ticket. However, operator errors can occur, which can produce unnecessary printed materials and waste time, papers and toner.